Remember that the "you" in this case was Ransom Love, who led the pre-SCO Caldera. Nobody who's at SCO now seems to have any conception of the history Caldera had with Linux. It's not clear they have much conception of the history the original SCO had with Unix, for that matter.
To the person who answered this with "And you believed this?" I'd probably say, "Sure, I believe Love meant what he said." Unfortunately, while corporations may be legal persons, they very often are legal persons with no long-term memory. (As someone pointed out, Darl McBride has claimed that SCO owns C++; while I have to give the man points for ambition, I don't think he has the faintest clue about Unix and Linux history.)
...until there is a replacement for their products that will satisfy not just web designers but the prepress and technical document preparation industries. Photoshop, Illustrator, and FrameMaker are leaders in their markets because they have no real competition. (The GIMP doesn't have what prepress operators need, and the venerable Emacs/TeX combination isn't an answer to Frame's document management capabilities.)
From the market you're looking at--video--Adobe may well be in trouble. But it took years for them to get to that position, and it'll take many more years for anything to change in the markets they're more firmly entrenched in. You can see this, ironically, in Adobe's own challenge of Quark's position as the dominant graphic layout program with InDesign. Everyone thought InDesign was "promising" at version 1.0, at version 1.5 it was considered a strong contender, and at 2.0 it got accolades as noticeably superior to Xpress 5... yet, Xpress was still consistently cited as a main reason why Macintosh professionals weren't switching to OS X, and why Xpress 6 has been greeted with relief even though everyone assumes ahead of time it's going to be an expensive porker. If you read prepress journals, in fact, you'll find that many printing houses are still on Xpress 4 or even 3.3. InDesign will have to not only be as good as Xpress, it'll have to be much better than Xpress, cheaper than Xpress, and be backed by Adobe for another three or four years before it starts seriously eroding Quark's userbase.
Okay, it's not just me. I remember loving the Apple Pro keyboard and at least liking the keyboard before the current iteration, but the haptic quality of Apple's current keyboards is terrible. Ironically, the "low travel" keyboard on the PowerBook is much better than the desktop keyboards.
I noticed Zathrus' link below to PCKeyboard.com, which would almost be what I'm looking for--I want to find a keyboard with that "Selectric" feel that's USB-based, so it can work with the Mac. Failing that, are there any good recommendations you (or aynone else) have for third-party Apple keyboards with good tactile quality?
Except that Bored of the Rings is a parody work, which the unauthorized Harry Potter book presumably doesn't qualify as. (It's worth noting in passing that Bored of the Rings doesn't use the same names for the characters, either.)
This case has another genre precedent which is far more relevant: shortly after the first Star Wars movie--at a point when sequels weren't being discussed by Lucas (the entire "nine movie saga, of which this is the fourth!" mythology hadn't been invented yet, IIRC)--a continuation novel came out, Splinter of the Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster. It sold fairly well, and according to some people actually helped spur Lucas into realizing there was a strong demand for more stories.
And it also started lawsuits that kept going for years, because Lucas hadn't given permission.
Some of those who read Splinter thought it'd have been better than what actually happened; some thought it was absolutely dreadful. (I'm kind of neutral on that point; Empire Strikes Back was a brilliant pulp movie, but Splinter set up more complex and in some ways more logical story threads.) But for practical purposes, that wasn't the point. We're not even talking about copyright owners coming back after 30 years to say "fie on you, evil lawbreaker!"; we're talking about a copyright that would be "living" even in the limited 7 or 14 years range.
And that's what we're talking about here, too. This isn't a parody of Harry Potter and it isn't a continuation of something that would have been out of copyright even according to original copyright laws. For Christ's sake, the woman is still writing books and even in the shortest lengths of copyright critics talk about, the first book would still be under protection.
There's a case to be made for rolling back the copyright extensions we've seen in the last few decades, certainly--but this is not that case.
(N.B.: as an ironic footnote to the Splinter of the Mind's Eye case, Alan Dean Foster actually wrote the novelization of Star Wars that was released under George Lucas' name.)
The application tests were done live by Apple on stage, not by Veritest. There is no evidence either for or against the assertion that Apple turned off anything when the machines were running on stage.
The current version of Logic isn't available for the PC, and Cubase is (we're told, and it's plausible) the most popular "professional" music sequencer on the platform. We can argue about whether or not that's "fair," but when you're comparing tasks and looking at them as being performed by "best of breed" applications, I think it's defensible.
What's not being made clear in this discussion is that the Mac and the PC weren't merely sequencing, they were sequencing and doing software synthesis, which is considerably more CPU and bandwidth-intensive. This is, I suspect, where the PowerMac G5's advantage really comes in for this application--regardless of the CPU's SPECint scores, the system is damn good at moving a lot of data around very quickly.
Actually, according to the keynote, some of the ASICs on the motherboard are designed by Apple and manufactured by IBM. It's true it's not a "from the ground up" design, but I'm not sure any Power Mac, at least from the point Apple adopted PCI as a bus, has really been such.
And if anything would convince a bunch of otherwise stridently libertarian coder geeks that genetically modified food is bad, this particular GMO would do it! "Monsanto is threatening our caffeine! To arms!"
The chances are roughly zero. Eventually people will get this through their heads, but I'll repost an earlier clarification of this again.
Ray Noorda isn't involved at all with Novell now and has never, despite repeated assertions to the contrary on Slashdot, been directly involved with Caldera. The Canopy Group funded the original Caldera as a spinoff of a defunct Novell project ("Expose," an attempt at a corporate-friendly Linux long before other companies had thought of it). He wasn't a founder of Caldera, nor of the original SCO, and because it bears repeating, the current SCO has no management in common with either the original SCO (now Tarantella) or the circa-1995 Caldera Systems.
Furthermore, while Canopy Group's web page proudly mentions they were founded by Ray Noorda in 1995, he's no longer listed anywhere on their management page.
* * *
A 1999 statement by the Canopy Group that Linux was going to be a source of skyrocketing growth proves nothing other than, well, they believed what half the other VCs in the world seemed to in 1999. I don't see why (some) people here are insisting on trying to blame the current SCO debacle on Noorda; he hated Microsoft long before it was fashionable, and saw the value in Linux years before anyone else in the Fortune 500 world did. If anything, if he was still involved with the Canopy Group, I suspect they'd be more likely to issue a statement distancing themselves from this fiasco.
Caldera acquired DR-DOS from Novell, which Novell got from Digital Research. While I agree with your main point, it's important for old geeks like me to clarify this sort of thing. DR-DOS was the legitimate descendant of CP/M (it's actually the renamed CP/M-86). If you know your MS-DOS history, you'll know it came from QDOS, which was Seattle Computer's unauthorized 8080-to-8086 translation of CP/M. So in a real sense, MS-DOS is in fact a copy of DR-DOS, not the reverse.
It's also worth giving credit where credit is due. Tetris aside, Caldera was really the first company that pushed concepts Linux users take for granted now like easy installs, file and network browsing, etc. They may have dropped the ball years ago, but they were the first "Linux-focused company" to put the ball into play. I don't consider the current SCO to have much to do with that Caldera, though.
Ray Noorda isn't involved at all with Novell now and has never, despite repeated assertions to the contrary on Slashdot, been directly involved with Caldera. The Canopy Group funded the original Caldera as a spinoff of a defunct Novell project ("Expose," an attempt at a corporate-friendly Linux long before other companies had thought of it). He wasn't a founder of Caldera, nor of the original SCO, and because it bears repeating, the current SCO has no management in common with either the original SCO (now Tarantella) or the circa-1995 Caldera Systems.
Furthermore, while Canopy Group's web page proudly mentions they were founded by Ray Noorda in 1995, he's no longer listed anywhere on their management page.
SCO actually developed Xenix with Microsoft. Microsoft sold their part of the rights back to SCO years ago.
"SCO Unix" and "SCO Xenix" are different products.
UnixWare was bought from Novell, and it is a different product from the other two.
The current "SCO" was formed when Caldera bought all of SCO's Unix assets so SCO could focus on Tarantella, an enterprise remote computing system. SCO then changed their name to Tarantella, and later Caldera changed their name to SCO.
In other words, the current "SCO" is not the SCO that worked on Xenix with Microsoft in the first place. That company is Tarantella, which isn't in the Unix business anymore.
Furthermore, while Caldera-now-SCO has nothing in common with the original SCO, Caldera-now-SCO has almost nothing in common with the original Caldera. The shift toward "survival by litigation" comes shortly after an entirely new management team was put in place.
Microsoft recently licensed rights to use Unix from Caldera-now-SCO. This is clearly an attempt to hop onto the "Linux = Copyright Infringement" bandwagon that Caldera-now-SCO started, but there's no evidence to suggest a larger conspiracy.
The current DR DOS website isn't SCO's. When Lineo, the embedded systems spinoff from Caldera that was given ownership of DR DOS, collapsed, its CEO reformed a new company called DeviceLogics, and they purchased DR DOS from the Canopy Group.
This CEO--Bryan Sparks--really seemed to be the "prime mover" behind Caldera in its early days, even more than Ransom Love (who I think caught flak from the Linux community that he may not have completely deserved). It's worth keeping in mind that the current "SCO" has pretty much zero in common with either the original Caldera or the original SCO . I'd be surprised if there are many--if any--engineers there now who were at either original firm five years ago, and it doesn't seem that any executives have been with SCO since before 2000.
At any rate, the chances are that when DeviceLogics bought the IP for DR DOS, they didn't inherit any legal claims--the suit over Microsoft's practices against DR DOS was settled by Caldera. What you're noticing isn't a sign of conspiracy; it's a sign of irrelevance, at least from a corporate standpoint. (When you're trying to promote a "new" DOS for embedded systems, "we got into a big legal fight with Microsoft" isn't honestly much of a selling point.)
I keep seeing this "Microsoft may be behind this!" thread throughout discussion of SCO, and it's worth pointing out, in bold capitals, THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE FOR THIS. Yes, SCO and Microsoft had a "connection" in the past, in that Microsoft sold their Unix clone, Xenix, to SCO. So what? They weren't a Microsoft partner, they were a Microsoft dumping ground. And again, the current SCO isn't that SCO. The original SCO is what became Tarantella; they sold off their Unix to Caldera, just like Microsoft sold off Xenix to them (and for much the same reason--they perceived it was a dying product).
That's because Unisys is a $5.6B services company and your company is one of the ones contributing to that revenue. Congratulations! By all appearances, Unisys successfully "reinvented" themselves and the GIF patent battle doesn't seem to have harmed them at all. (For photographic images JPEG would have supplanted GIF anyway, and GIF still has a commanding lead in the annoying animated image market on the web. Despite its technical promise, PNG is still, after eight years, a fringe player.)
So, successfully extorting money from a dying patent and then going on to be a successful service company... yeah, SCO-Caldera would probably love to be the next Unisys. I'm aware the original story submitter was attempting to be ironic, but if he'd spent sixty seconds actually answering his own question about where Unisys is today he might have thought twice about it.
While The Lord of the Rings certainly isn't a retelling of the gospels, it's not only explicitly Christian, it's explicitly Catholic. I did a paper on this long ago, but you can find a brief summation of it at Tolkien Online.
While your warning is generally valid (about separating stories from authorial intent), serious themes generally aren't added just to make a story "more interesting to viewers," they're explicitly developed in the story's background. This isn't to say that the author is consciously explicating his religion or philosophy, but that an author who holds very strong beliefs about the way life "should be" can't help but let those ideas influence any work of sufficient scope that they're involved in. This is definitely the case of literary-minded writers from Tolkien to Ayn Rand, on through modern-day authors like John Crowley and Barbara Kingsolver.
And, hey, it sounds pretentious to talk about this in terms of something so Uber-Pop-Culture as The Matrix--but hell, a lot of people have commented on how very Mormon Battlestar Galactica is. That ain't a coincidence, either, and chances it wasn't done because Glen Larson consciously thought "Hey, I bet Joseph Smith in space is a surefire way to get a primetime series!"
Berman's idea of a different culture is one with an opressed third gender? Woah! That's innovation! And there's a male and female of the species and they're married? Unbelievable....
Actually, the episode from yesterday to which you refer did something virtually unheard of in modern "Trek." The humans interfered with good intentions in the oh-very-PC way that they often do and it ended in tragedy. Not even an "in darkness there is hope" final scene. They followed it to the logical, unpleasant conclusion instead of pulling a happy ending out of their ass.
Your sarcasm is cute, but it breezes past the fact that freeing the cogenitor from the perceived oppression would have been the point in most Trek episodes, and this one took a markedly different route. While I don't think depressing episodes are in and of themselves signs of quality, if more "Enterprise" episodes had the courage to be that honest, there'd be a lot less to bitch about.
The preface also mentions, proudly, that the book was typeset on (among other things) a NeXT box. Given that NeXT by and large was a serious attempt to address a lot of the usability bitches and whines the book is based on, one suspects there was a certain deliberate blindness on the part of the Unix-Haters. Of course, they were mostly basing their bashing on things about Unix that were already archaic in computer terms by the time the book was published in print form--never let progress get in the way of a good rant, right?:)
Like it or not, Flash is installed--not just available, but installed--on about 98% of the browser base. That number is from Macromedia, but when you think about it, there's little reason to doubt it: it comes with IE and Netscape on nearly all platforms (even many boxed Linux distributions). If you want a fancy woo-woo website guaranteed to work cross-platform, you are better off doing it in Flash than you are in straight HTML.
And yes, "why do fancy woo-woo websites" is a valid question. But in this particular case, the answer "because this is a promo site for a movie and people are definitionally at the website to see multimedia, so they can suck it up and deal with Flash" is probably a valid answer.
I think Caldera got about 150M, not 500M, and more to the point, Ray Noorda is not Caldera. His VC company (Canopy) was one of their initial backers. That doesn't mean he had substantial input into their direction--quite frankly, I think they'd have been much less stupid if he had--and money that went to Caldera is by no means money that went back to Canopy, let alone Noorda personally as you effectively imply.
I don't see what the animosity toward Noorda is about. If anything, he was the first "suit" to actually get Linux's power, and he was trying to challenge Microsoft long before most of the rest of the computing industry understood what the big deal was. He made a few dramatic mistakes, to be sure, but blaming him for what Caldera became is pretty off-base.
It's worth noting that what's calling itself SCO today has virtually nothing to do with the original SCO (which is now Tarantella) and very little to do with the original Caldera (some of which became Device Logics, and most of the rest of which has just wandered into the ozone, I guess). I've encouraged my friends to start calling this incarnation of the company "Turnip Head Limited."
Because designing a good font--particularly a good body font--is a lot harder than people seem to think it is. And despite what the other reply to you said, it has very little to do with brand names.
First and foremost, you're designing something that has to be independent of output devices. It has to look perfect on a laser printer and a high-end typesetter, and look at least readable on a screen. These aren't just "pictures of letters," they're mathematical descriptions of letters.
Second, if you're doing a full font set--one fo the ones that costs you $200, not $25--you're not just designing an alphabet. You're doing upper case, lower case, numbers, punctuation and symbols. Everything on the keyboard. But wait, not just everything on the keyboard. Now do all the letters that have accents, both upper and lower case. Do all the typography symbols--em dashes, en dashes, open and close quotes, fractions, bullets, daggers, European punctuation symbols. All of those are crafted to be matched with a good body font, remember. Oh, yes, don't forget all the ligatures like "ae," "fi", "fl", "ff" (and "ffi" and "ffl," if you're pedantic--and these are just the standard ligatures). Repeat for any symbol combination that's different between upper and lower case, too.
Now do that all again three times. Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic are, in a good body font, entirely different. Just thickening the lines and tilting the letters doesn't cut it. (This is particularly true for italic.) And, if you're doing this for professonal print use, you'll want to do a true small cap set--they're not just capitals reduced in size, they're subtly reproportioned capitals--and a set of oldstyle numerals. And maybe a few alternate caps, if you're doing a font that could also be used for headline copy. (For the sake of simplicity, we'll assume you're not doing opticals--new versions of the entire set of all those letters, reproportioned to look better at different font sizes. But really professional fonts--including TeX's native Computer Modern--actually do this.)
Now, keep in mind that when these letters are put together they have to flow correctly. You need to make sure all the letters are spaced just so. Put all the proper metrics into the font so programs that are aware of it (like good desktop publishing programs, or TeX) know how to do this.
And last but not least, the font has to fulfill its basic function of being easily readable. Even digital fonts are following in the footsteps of an art going back hundreds of years. The strokes and the weights of good typefaces are very carefully designed, down to the subtle differences in periods and the dots on the "i". (Seriously. Take a close look sometime.) It may take a font designer, or at least an experienced typesetter, to be really consciously aware of the differences, but people who aren't trained will still notice a bad font. Something won't be quite right. They'll say it's ugly, it's hard to read. They just won't want to use it.
If you're only looking for on-screen fonts, sure, the bar is lower. If you're only looking for decorative fonts, the bar is also lower. But there's a reason beyond mere "brand power" that Adobe Chaparral Pro is $200.
While I should know better than to get into this, it really pisses me off when people damn others for making huge, sweeping generalizations while making huge, sweeping generalizations themselves.
"True environmentalists" don't believe in taking people's rights away, no. News flash. You don't have a right to pollute the river that flows past your property because that river then flows past my property. You ever hear the old Libertarian maxim, "your right to swing your nose ends at my face?" It applies to the environment, too. You don't have a right to do things with your property that affect my property, or anyone else's.
Water and air are a common good that cannot be owned by anyone. This ain't communist propaganda. It's fucking common sense, people. And it means that sometimes as a property owner your rights are going to be curtailed. Deal with it. I support gun rights, but they don't include a right to fire your gun without paying attention to where you're pointing it.
And, no, companies not wanting to clean up their act is not hogwash. Companies want to spend as little as they can and charge the highest prices they can. This isn't because they're evil, it's because they're trying to increase their capital. Hello! That's why it's called capitalism. Not all companies are responsible citizens. Some of them will do exactly the same calculation Ford made with the Pinto: balance the cost of expected fines and lawsuits from doing things sleazily against the cost of doing things the right way, and doing things sleazily if it's a lower expense. They can do this because when they're caught, they can apologize profusely and know that they will have lots of defenders saying thing like: "The presidents of these companies are pople like you and I."
Furthermore, people with your attitude seem to be really hep on bashing environmental groups for having "vested interests" in scaring people. You never once seem to be willing to admit that maybe, just maybe, corporations making billions of dollars on practices those environmental groups are criticizing could have a vested interest in making sure that you dismiss the environmentalists as kooks. Individual donations to the Center for Science in the Public Interest make it a scare group, but the blatant industry backing of JunkScience.com couldn't possibly influence their reporting, right? Check.
Funny, to me being about individual rights has nothing to do with promoting corporations and bashing government any more than it does to do with bashing corporations and promoting government. Many libertarians have figured that out. Have you?
Scientists who aren't on Exxon's payroll aren't arguing about whether the temperature's rising, and they're not even arguing about whether humans are having an effect--the debate has moved to what effect we are having, and how to control it. If you think this is just the province of Greenpeace kids hanging signs from smokestacks, congratulations! The industry is keeping you in the '80s. This debate isn't going on in Granola Crunch Quarterly anymore, it's going on in Nature.
Wake up. By and large environmentalists are not out to send us into the dark ages or to create a happy Marxist utopia. They're out to make us think about the resources we use and to convice us that we should use less, even if using less is going to be inconvenient. And, yes, using less might mean some industries have to change. It's happened before. Why is it so horrific to consider that it might have to happen again?
You've actually hit a big problem (at least the big one in my book) with fundamental assumptions underlying our whole market economy. Not a problem with the concept of markets or capitalism, lest anyone assume I'm making a more sweeping indictment than I am, but a problem with the idea that companies must constantly grow.
The problem with that idea is obvious to me, although I guess many economics majors would dispute it: it forces companies to behave badly. Merely becoming and remaining profitable isn't good enough. Your profits must increase year over year or The Market will punish you. Eventually, the markets for your products or services will be saturated--but that's not good enough, no matter that everyone in your company and all your investors should do quite well at that point. You must now try to completely dominate your market--if you don't try to squash all your competition, you will be punished.. If you don't move into other markets, you will be punished. And if you don't start cutting back on your costs, you will be punished, even if that means reducing work force and quality--after all, if you've successfully squashed enough competition, you'll have made it difficult both for consumers to find alternatives to you and for potential new competitors to enter the market.
So the drive is to create monolithic companies with poor service, poor quality and with terrifically high barriers of entry for competitors. And this is supposed to be good?
I'm all for Google staying out of this mess. In the long run, I'm all for the market getting a collective clue that maybe a steady-state economic model has some advantages over a relentless-growth one.
Well, there's Acquisition, a Gnutella client for OS X that's written in Java. Actually, it's based on Limewire, which is also written in Java. They're both open source.
There's also jEdit, which I haven't used but seems to be getting a bit of a cult following as a new GUI text editor.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that the "you" in this case was Ransom Love, who led the pre-SCO Caldera. Nobody who's at SCO now seems to have any conception of the history Caldera had with Linux. It's not clear they have much conception of the history the original SCO had with Unix, for that matter.
To the person who answered this with "And you believed this?" I'd probably say, "Sure, I believe Love meant what he said." Unfortunately, while corporations may be legal persons, they very often are legal persons with no long-term memory. (As someone pointed out, Darl McBride has claimed that SCO owns C++; while I have to give the man points for ambition, I don't think he has the faintest clue about Unix and Linux history.)
...until there is a replacement for their products that will satisfy not just web designers but the prepress and technical document preparation industries. Photoshop, Illustrator, and FrameMaker are leaders in their markets because they have no real competition. (The GIMP doesn't have what prepress operators need, and the venerable Emacs/TeX combination isn't an answer to Frame's document management capabilities.)
From the market you're looking at--video--Adobe may well be in trouble. But it took years for them to get to that position, and it'll take many more years for anything to change in the markets they're more firmly entrenched in. You can see this, ironically, in Adobe's own challenge of Quark's position as the dominant graphic layout program with InDesign. Everyone thought InDesign was "promising" at version 1.0, at version 1.5 it was considered a strong contender, and at 2.0 it got accolades as noticeably superior to Xpress 5... yet, Xpress was still consistently cited as a main reason why Macintosh professionals weren't switching to OS X, and why Xpress 6 has been greeted with relief even though everyone assumes ahead of time it's going to be an expensive porker. If you read prepress journals, in fact, you'll find that many printing houses are still on Xpress 4 or even 3.3. InDesign will have to not only be as good as Xpress, it'll have to be much better than Xpress, cheaper than Xpress, and be backed by Adobe for another three or four years before it starts seriously eroding Quark's userbase.
Okay, it's not just me. I remember loving the Apple Pro keyboard and at least liking the keyboard before the current iteration, but the haptic quality of Apple's current keyboards is terrible. Ironically, the "low travel" keyboard on the PowerBook is much better than the desktop keyboards.
I noticed Zathrus' link below to PCKeyboard.com, which would almost be what I'm looking for--I want to find a keyboard with that "Selectric" feel that's USB-based, so it can work with the Mac. Failing that, are there any good recommendations you (or aynone else) have for third-party Apple keyboards with good tactile quality?
Except that Bored of the Rings is a parody work, which the unauthorized Harry Potter book presumably doesn't qualify as. (It's worth noting in passing that Bored of the Rings doesn't use the same names for the characters, either.)
This case has another genre precedent which is far more relevant: shortly after the first Star Wars movie--at a point when sequels weren't being discussed by Lucas (the entire "nine movie saga, of which this is the fourth!" mythology hadn't been invented yet, IIRC)--a continuation novel came out, Splinter of the Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster. It sold fairly well, and according to some people actually helped spur Lucas into realizing there was a strong demand for more stories.
And it also started lawsuits that kept going for years, because Lucas hadn't given permission.
Some of those who read Splinter thought it'd have been better than what actually happened; some thought it was absolutely dreadful. (I'm kind of neutral on that point; Empire Strikes Back was a brilliant pulp movie, but Splinter set up more complex and in some ways more logical story threads.) But for practical purposes, that wasn't the point. We're not even talking about copyright owners coming back after 30 years to say "fie on you, evil lawbreaker!"; we're talking about a copyright that would be "living" even in the limited 7 or 14 years range.
And that's what we're talking about here, too. This isn't a parody of Harry Potter and it isn't a continuation of something that would have been out of copyright even according to original copyright laws. For Christ's sake, the woman is still writing books and even in the shortest lengths of copyright critics talk about, the first book would still be under protection.
There's a case to be made for rolling back the copyright extensions we've seen in the last few decades, certainly--but this is not that case.
(N.B.: as an ironic footnote to the Splinter of the Mind's Eye case, Alan Dean Foster actually wrote the novelization of Star Wars that was released under George Lucas' name.)
The application tests were done live by Apple on stage, not by Veritest. There is no evidence either for or against the assertion that Apple turned off anything when the machines were running on stage.
The current version of Logic isn't available for the PC, and Cubase is (we're told, and it's plausible) the most popular "professional" music sequencer on the platform. We can argue about whether or not that's "fair," but when you're comparing tasks and looking at them as being performed by "best of breed" applications, I think it's defensible.
What's not being made clear in this discussion is that the Mac and the PC weren't merely sequencing, they were sequencing and doing software synthesis, which is considerably more CPU and bandwidth-intensive. This is, I suspect, where the PowerMac G5's advantage really comes in for this application--regardless of the CPU's SPECint scores, the system is damn good at moving a lot of data around very quickly.
Actually, according to the keynote, some of the ASICs on the motherboard are designed by Apple and manufactured by IBM. It's true it's not a "from the ground up" design, but I'm not sure any Power Mac, at least from the point Apple adopted PCI as a bus, has really been such.
Gee, why could that be?
Perhaps because there is no such thing as a Dual-CPU Pentium 4. Just a hunch.
Double those bottom numbers from the P4 and it handily beats the Dual-G5...
And multiply the numbers from a TRS-80 Model 4 by 10,000 or so and it absolutely wipes the floor with the Dual G5. Your point being?
And if anything would convince a bunch of otherwise stridently libertarian coder geeks that genetically modified food is bad, this particular GMO would do it! "Monsanto is threatening our caffeine! To arms!"
The chances are roughly zero. Eventually people will get this through their heads, but I'll repost an earlier clarification of this again.
Ray Noorda isn't involved at all with Novell now and has never, despite repeated assertions to the contrary on Slashdot, been directly involved with Caldera. The Canopy Group funded the original Caldera as a spinoff of a defunct Novell project ("Expose," an attempt at a corporate-friendly Linux long before other companies had thought of it). He wasn't a founder of Caldera, nor of the original SCO, and because it bears repeating, the current SCO has no management in common with either the original SCO (now Tarantella) or the circa-1995 Caldera Systems.
Furthermore, while Canopy Group's web page proudly mentions they were founded by Ray Noorda in 1995, he's no longer listed anywhere on their management page.
* * *
A 1999 statement by the Canopy Group that Linux was going to be a source of skyrocketing growth proves nothing other than, well, they believed what half the other VCs in the world seemed to in 1999. I don't see why (some) people here are insisting on trying to blame the current SCO debacle on Noorda; he hated Microsoft long before it was fashionable, and saw the value in Linux years before anyone else in the Fortune 500 world did. If anything, if he was still involved with the Canopy Group, I suspect they'd be more likely to issue a statement distancing themselves from this fiasco.
Caldera acquired DR-DOS from Novell, which Novell got from Digital Research. While I agree with your main point, it's important for old geeks like me to clarify this sort of thing. DR-DOS was the legitimate descendant of CP/M (it's actually the renamed CP/M-86). If you know your MS-DOS history, you'll know it came from QDOS, which was Seattle Computer's unauthorized 8080-to-8086 translation of CP/M. So in a real sense, MS-DOS is in fact a copy of DR-DOS, not the reverse.
It's also worth giving credit where credit is due. Tetris aside, Caldera was really the first company that pushed concepts Linux users take for granted now like easy installs, file and network browsing, etc. They may have dropped the ball years ago, but they were the first "Linux-focused company" to put the ball into play. I don't consider the current SCO to have much to do with that Caldera, though.
Ray Noorda isn't involved at all with Novell now and has never, despite repeated assertions to the contrary on Slashdot, been directly involved with Caldera. The Canopy Group funded the original Caldera as a spinoff of a defunct Novell project ("Expose," an attempt at a corporate-friendly Linux long before other companies had thought of it). He wasn't a founder of Caldera, nor of the original SCO, and because it bears repeating, the current SCO has no management in common with either the original SCO (now Tarantella) or the circa-1995 Caldera Systems.
Furthermore, while Canopy Group's web page proudly mentions they were founded by Ray Noorda in 1995, he's no longer listed anywhere on their management page.
This keeps coming up. The answer is "no."
The current DR DOS website isn't SCO's. When Lineo, the embedded systems spinoff from Caldera that was given ownership of DR DOS, collapsed, its CEO reformed a new company called DeviceLogics, and they purchased DR DOS from the Canopy Group.
This CEO--Bryan Sparks--really seemed to be the "prime mover" behind Caldera in its early days, even more than Ransom Love (who I think caught flak from the Linux community that he may not have completely deserved). It's worth keeping in mind that the current "SCO" has pretty much zero in common with either the original Caldera or the original SCO . I'd be surprised if there are many--if any--engineers there now who were at either original firm five years ago, and it doesn't seem that any executives have been with SCO since before 2000.
At any rate, the chances are that when DeviceLogics bought the IP for DR DOS, they didn't inherit any legal claims--the suit over Microsoft's practices against DR DOS was settled by Caldera. What you're noticing isn't a sign of conspiracy; it's a sign of irrelevance, at least from a corporate standpoint. (When you're trying to promote a "new" DOS for embedded systems, "we got into a big legal fight with Microsoft" isn't honestly much of a selling point.)
I keep seeing this "Microsoft may be behind this!" thread throughout discussion of SCO, and it's worth pointing out, in bold capitals, THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE FOR THIS. Yes, SCO and Microsoft had a "connection" in the past, in that Microsoft sold their Unix clone, Xenix, to SCO. So what? They weren't a Microsoft partner, they were a Microsoft dumping ground. And again, the current SCO isn't that SCO. The original SCO is what became Tarantella; they sold off their Unix to Caldera, just like Microsoft sold off Xenix to them (and for much the same reason--they perceived it was a dying product).
That's because Unisys is a $5.6B services company and your company is one of the ones contributing to that revenue. Congratulations! By all appearances, Unisys successfully "reinvented" themselves and the GIF patent battle doesn't seem to have harmed them at all. (For photographic images JPEG would have supplanted GIF anyway, and GIF still has a commanding lead in the annoying animated image market on the web. Despite its technical promise, PNG is still, after eight years, a fringe player.)
So, successfully extorting money from a dying patent and then going on to be a successful service company... yeah, SCO-Caldera would probably love to be the next Unisys. I'm aware the original story submitter was attempting to be ironic, but if he'd spent sixty seconds actually answering his own question about where Unisys is today he might have thought twice about it.
While The Lord of the Rings certainly isn't a retelling of the gospels, it's not only explicitly Christian, it's explicitly Catholic. I did a paper on this long ago, but you can find a brief summation of it at Tolkien Online.
While your warning is generally valid (about separating stories from authorial intent), serious themes generally aren't added just to make a story "more interesting to viewers," they're explicitly developed in the story's background. This isn't to say that the author is consciously explicating his religion or philosophy, but that an author who holds very strong beliefs about the way life "should be" can't help but let those ideas influence any work of sufficient scope that they're involved in. This is definitely the case of literary-minded writers from Tolkien to Ayn Rand, on through modern-day authors like John Crowley and Barbara Kingsolver.
And, hey, it sounds pretentious to talk about this in terms of something so Uber-Pop-Culture as The Matrix--but hell, a lot of people have commented on how very Mormon Battlestar Galactica is. That ain't a coincidence, either, and chances it wasn't done because Glen Larson consciously thought "Hey, I bet Joseph Smith in space is a surefire way to get a primetime series!"
Actually, the episode from yesterday to which you refer did something virtually unheard of in modern "Trek." The humans interfered with good intentions in the oh-very-PC way that they often do and it ended in tragedy. Not even an "in darkness there is hope" final scene. They followed it to the logical, unpleasant conclusion instead of pulling a happy ending out of their ass.
Your sarcasm is cute, but it breezes past the fact that freeing the cogenitor from the perceived oppression would have been the point in most Trek episodes, and this one took a markedly different route. While I don't think depressing episodes are in and of themselves signs of quality, if more "Enterprise" episodes had the courage to be that honest, there'd be a lot less to bitch about.
The preface also mentions, proudly, that the book was typeset on (among other things) a NeXT box. Given that NeXT by and large was a serious attempt to address a lot of the usability bitches and whines the book is based on, one suspects there was a certain deliberate blindness on the part of the Unix-Haters. Of course, they were mostly basing their bashing on things about Unix that were already archaic in computer terms by the time the book was published in print form--never let progress get in the way of a good rant, right? :)
Like it or not, Flash is installed--not just available, but installed--on about 98% of the browser base. That number is from Macromedia, but when you think about it, there's little reason to doubt it: it comes with IE and Netscape on nearly all platforms (even many boxed Linux distributions). If you want a fancy woo-woo website guaranteed to work cross-platform, you are better off doing it in Flash than you are in straight HTML.
And yes, "why do fancy woo-woo websites" is a valid question. But in this particular case, the answer "because this is a promo site for a movie and people are definitionally at the website to see multimedia, so they can suck it up and deal with Flash" is probably a valid answer.
I think Caldera got about 150M, not 500M, and more to the point, Ray Noorda is not Caldera. His VC company (Canopy) was one of their initial backers. That doesn't mean he had substantial input into their direction--quite frankly, I think they'd have been much less stupid if he had--and money that went to Caldera is by no means money that went back to Canopy, let alone Noorda personally as you effectively imply.
I don't see what the animosity toward Noorda is about. If anything, he was the first "suit" to actually get Linux's power, and he was trying to challenge Microsoft long before most of the rest of the computing industry understood what the big deal was. He made a few dramatic mistakes, to be sure, but blaming him for what Caldera became is pretty off-base.
It's worth noting that what's calling itself SCO today has virtually nothing to do with the original SCO (which is now Tarantella) and very little to do with the original Caldera (some of which became Device Logics, and most of the rest of which has just wandered into the ozone, I guess). I've encouraged my friends to start calling this incarnation of the company "Turnip Head Limited."
Because designing a good font--particularly a good body font--is a lot harder than people seem to think it is. And despite what the other reply to you said, it has very little to do with brand names.
First and foremost, you're designing something that has to be independent of output devices. It has to look perfect on a laser printer and a high-end typesetter, and look at least readable on a screen. These aren't just "pictures of letters," they're mathematical descriptions of letters.
Second, if you're doing a full font set--one fo the ones that costs you $200, not $25--you're not just designing an alphabet. You're doing upper case, lower case, numbers, punctuation and symbols. Everything on the keyboard. But wait, not just everything on the keyboard. Now do all the letters that have accents, both upper and lower case. Do all the typography symbols--em dashes, en dashes, open and close quotes, fractions, bullets, daggers, European punctuation symbols. All of those are crafted to be matched with a good body font, remember. Oh, yes, don't forget all the ligatures like "ae," "fi", "fl", "ff" (and "ffi" and "ffl," if you're pedantic--and these are just the standard ligatures). Repeat for any symbol combination that's different between upper and lower case, too.
Now do that all again three times. Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic are, in a good body font, entirely different. Just thickening the lines and tilting the letters doesn't cut it. (This is particularly true for italic.) And, if you're doing this for professonal print use, you'll want to do a true small cap set--they're not just capitals reduced in size, they're subtly reproportioned capitals--and a set of oldstyle numerals. And maybe a few alternate caps, if you're doing a font that could also be used for headline copy. (For the sake of simplicity, we'll assume you're not doing opticals--new versions of the entire set of all those letters, reproportioned to look better at different font sizes. But really professional fonts--including TeX's native Computer Modern--actually do this.)
Now, keep in mind that when these letters are put together they have to flow correctly. You need to make sure all the letters are spaced just so. Put all the proper metrics into the font so programs that are aware of it (like good desktop publishing programs, or TeX) know how to do this.
And last but not least, the font has to fulfill its basic function of being easily readable. Even digital fonts are following in the footsteps of an art going back hundreds of years. The strokes and the weights of good typefaces are very carefully designed, down to the subtle differences in periods and the dots on the "i". (Seriously. Take a close look sometime.) It may take a font designer, or at least an experienced typesetter, to be really consciously aware of the differences, but people who aren't trained will still notice a bad font. Something won't be quite right. They'll say it's ugly, it's hard to read. They just won't want to use it.
If you're only looking for on-screen fonts, sure, the bar is lower. If you're only looking for decorative fonts, the bar is also lower. But there's a reason beyond mere "brand power" that Adobe Chaparral Pro is $200.
While I should know better than to get into this, it really pisses me off when people damn others for making huge, sweeping generalizations while making huge, sweeping generalizations themselves.
"True environmentalists" don't believe in taking people's rights away, no. News flash. You don't have a right to pollute the river that flows past your property because that river then flows past my property. You ever hear the old Libertarian maxim, "your right to swing your nose ends at my face?" It applies to the environment, too. You don't have a right to do things with your property that affect my property, or anyone else's.
Water and air are a common good that cannot be owned by anyone. This ain't communist propaganda. It's fucking common sense, people. And it means that sometimes as a property owner your rights are going to be curtailed. Deal with it. I support gun rights, but they don't include a right to fire your gun without paying attention to where you're pointing it.
And, no, companies not wanting to clean up their act is not hogwash. Companies want to spend as little as they can and charge the highest prices they can. This isn't because they're evil, it's because they're trying to increase their capital. Hello! That's why it's called capitalism. Not all companies are responsible citizens. Some of them will do exactly the same calculation Ford made with the Pinto: balance the cost of expected fines and lawsuits from doing things sleazily against the cost of doing things the right way, and doing things sleazily if it's a lower expense. They can do this because when they're caught, they can apologize profusely and know that they will have lots of defenders saying thing like: "The presidents of these companies are pople like you and I."
Furthermore, people with your attitude seem to be really hep on bashing environmental groups for having "vested interests" in scaring people. You never once seem to be willing to admit that maybe, just maybe, corporations making billions of dollars on practices those environmental groups are criticizing could have a vested interest in making sure that you dismiss the environmentalists as kooks. Individual donations to the Center for Science in the Public Interest make it a scare group, but the blatant industry backing of JunkScience.com couldn't possibly influence their reporting, right? Check.
Funny, to me being about individual rights has nothing to do with promoting corporations and bashing government any more than it does to do with bashing corporations and promoting government. Many libertarians have figured that out. Have you?
Scientists who aren't on Exxon's payroll aren't arguing about whether the temperature's rising, and they're not even arguing about whether humans are having an effect--the debate has moved to what effect we are having, and how to control it. If you think this is just the province of Greenpeace kids hanging signs from smokestacks, congratulations! The industry is keeping you in the '80s. This debate isn't going on in Granola Crunch Quarterly anymore, it's going on in Nature.
Wake up. By and large environmentalists are not out to send us into the dark ages or to create a happy Marxist utopia. They're out to make us think about the resources we use and to convice us that we should use less, even if using less is going to be inconvenient. And, yes, using less might mean some industries have to change. It's happened before. Why is it so horrific to consider that it might have to happen again?
Hm. That a very recent, active-by-that-group's standards thread is titled "Netrek is dead" isn't very encouraging, is it? :)
You've actually hit a big problem (at least the big one in my book) with fundamental assumptions underlying our whole market economy. Not a problem with the concept of markets or capitalism, lest anyone assume I'm making a more sweeping indictment than I am, but a problem with the idea that companies must constantly grow.
The problem with that idea is obvious to me, although I guess many economics majors would dispute it: it forces companies to behave badly. Merely becoming and remaining profitable isn't good enough. Your profits must increase year over year or The Market will punish you. Eventually, the markets for your products or services will be saturated--but that's not good enough, no matter that everyone in your company and all your investors should do quite well at that point. You must now try to completely dominate your market--if you don't try to squash all your competition, you will be punished.. If you don't move into other markets, you will be punished. And if you don't start cutting back on your costs, you will be punished, even if that means reducing work force and quality--after all, if you've successfully squashed enough competition, you'll have made it difficult both for consumers to find alternatives to you and for potential new competitors to enter the market.
So the drive is to create monolithic companies with poor service, poor quality and with terrifically high barriers of entry for competitors. And this is supposed to be good?
I'm all for Google staying out of this mess. In the long run, I'm all for the market getting a collective clue that maybe a steady-state economic model has some advantages over a relentless-growth one.
Well, there's Acquisition, a Gnutella client for OS X that's written in Java. Actually, it's based on Limewire, which is also written in Java. They're both open source.
There's also jEdit, which I haven't used but seems to be getting a bit of a cult following as a new GUI text editor.